A confession is a promise there’s nothing else.
Huang's note never says there was only one affair. It didn't have to. When a man volunteers the worst thing about himself, we assume we've heard all of it. Nvidia's directors assumed so on Sunday. Jurors do the same thing.
Trial lawyers call volunteering a bad fact fronting. Say your client had back surgery five years before her car wreck. You tell the jury about the surgery in your opening, and the defense lawyer has nothing left to spring on her.
The eggshell rule takes care of the back surgery. It does nothing for the old neck injury she never mentioned, because you can’t front what you don’t know.
A hidden neck injury does more damage than the back surgery ever could, because jurors reread the first confession as a strategy. They also remember which lawyer told them the back surgery was the whole story.
Nvidia's directors put their own credibility behind Huang on Sunday. By Thursday they were introducing an interim CEO.
The defense will find the other half.
Clients leave things out. Some are embarrassed. Some have decided the old workers' comp claim doesn't matter. And some figure that if they hand you one bad fact, nobody will go looking for the second.
I'd put Huang in that last group.
Meredith Hinton, a trial attorney at Ricci Law Firm in North Carolina, showed how fast somebody can dig. During a six-week trial over a wall collapse that killed a worker, a defense witness told the jury he vividly remembered a phone call approving the work on that wall.
Hinton was sure the witness had denied that call somewhere in his three days of deposition testimony. Over lunch, she asked Eve to find every place he'd discussed the call and had his denial in seconds.
The jury watched video of the denial that afternoon. The verdict was $101 million.
That search works in both directions. A defense firm can run it on your client's deposition, her medical records and ten years of her Facebook posts.
A board investigating its CEO opens with the same question: "Is there anything else we need to know?" It tends to get the same answer.
Ask something a client can't answer with a no.
Pull the records yourself, put them in front of your client and ask about what's in them. "Tell me about this 2019 workers' comp claim" gets you a story. "Anything else?" gets you a no.
The Times found five people who worked at Nvidia and knew about the second affair. Whatever those five people knew on Wednesday, they knew on Sunday, when Huang hit send.
